I'm still basically on vacation from blogging, but I discovered this today and felt a sort of urgency about getting it typed up and posted right away -- as if some particular person needs to read it, and needs to read it at a particular time.
I can't imagine why that would be -- it's really just a bit of historical trivia -- but if any of my readers happen to have experienced nine paranormal knocks in three groups of three, you may be interested to learn that you're not alone. Whitley Strieber experienced this in 1986; and the entire town of Glenrock, Wyoming, in 1988. And long before that -- I learned today -- in the winter of 1716-17, the family of Methodist founders John and Charles Wesley experienced the very same thing.
Starting tomorrow, I will be offline almost all of the time and will not be posting anything. I also won't be reading or commenting on other people's blogs much and will be an even less than usually reliable email correspondent. I anticipate a return to normal online activity on or shortly after May 28.
It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."
This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.
This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)
One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers --
That perches in the soul --
And sings the tune without the words --
And never stops -- at all --
The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."
If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."
The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!
Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.
How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)
Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"
So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.
By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.
In “Transposition,” a sermon delivered during World War II and published in 1949 in Transposition and Other Addresses, C. S. Lewis refers to dogs’ inability to understand pointing.
You will have noticed that dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all.
If you’ve ever owned a dog, you will no doubt find this a rather extraordinary thing to say. Dogs obviously understand pointing, even without any training, and it’s quite common to train dogs to respond to pointing as a command (for example, pointing to a doorway to tell the dog to go into the room indicated). No dog I’ve ever met would waste time sniffing my finger when I’d just pointed out a bit of food it could eat. Cats, yes, but certainly not dogs.
However, Lewis had already had no fewer than six dogs by the time “Transposition” was published (details here), so it’s hard to dismiss what he says about them. This isn’t Pliny the Elder we’re dealing with, reporting hearsay about animals he’d had no personal contact with. Lewis knew dogs well and must surely have known from direct experience how they respond to pointing.
Is it possible that Lewis was right, and that dogs have changed in the half-century since he wrote?
We know that dogs’ ability to understand pointing is a relatively recent evolutionary development. According to dog expert Stanley Coren (as quoted in a 2009 Bloomberg article), domestic dogs understand pointing but their wild conspecifics do not.
“Suppose I point at something — the dog recognizes that I’m indicating something in that direction and looks,” Coren said, referring to a 2004 experiment carried out by Harvard anthropologist Brian Hare, which focused on the increase in dog IQ from domestication. “They do this even if they’re eight to ten weeks old, whereas a wolf, reared since puppyhood in a human environment, would look at my hand,” explained Coren.
Is it possible that the change Coren alludes to could have happened within living memory, sometime after the Second World War? It would be interesting to comb old books for references to dogs’ understanding or not understanding pointing and try to infer when the change took place.
I suppose it’s also possible that geography is a factor. Perhaps the North American dogs studied by Hare and Coren have abilities which English dogs do not. (Iain McGilchrist, a Scot, also refers to dogs’ ability to understand pointing, but he seems to be drawing on the same American research as Coren, not on his own experience.) Most of my own experience with dogs has been in America, but I often see stray Taiwan Tugous (a local breed far removed from anything in Europe or America) and should be able to test their responsiveness to pointing.
If you have any direct experience with dogs and pointing, or if you know of any references to it in books, please leave a comment.
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2023 addendum:
This is from p. 36 of The Hidden Springs: An Enquiry into Extra-sensory Perception (1961) by Renée Haynes:
Humans . . . may also observe that no domestic animal can understand the human gesture of the pointing finger; cats and dogs alike may sniff or lick that finger, but will never follow the line it indicates towards a bone or dish of milk.
"Cats and dogs alike"! As if this were not one of the most conspicuous cognitive differences between the two species!
I have not been able to discover how much first-hand experience Renée Haynes may have had with dogs, so it is not clear whether she speaks from her own knowledge or merely passes on received opinion. At any rate, to say that dogs do not understand pointing was apparently considered uncontroversial as recently as 1961 -- just 43 years before it was experimentally demonstrated that they do. It seems fantastic that canine nature could have changed in such a short time. But, supposing it did not change, it also seems fantastic that such a basic misconception about such a very familiar animal could have persisted for so long -- and in England, of all places, a country Haynes calls a "Dog's Paradise where Cerberus himself would be fed with vitaminized biscuits."
Today I happened to read this in William Bramley’s Gods of Eden. His premise is the quasi-Gnostic one that the “gods” of the early chapters of Genesis were extraterrestrial oppressors trying to keep mankind in slavery by denying us knowledge of good and evil and of our immortality.
The Custodians clearly did not want mankind to begin traveling the road to spiritual recovery. The reason is obvious. The Custodial society wanted slaves. It is difficult to make thralls of people who maintain their integrity and sense of ethics. It becomes impossible when those same individuals are uncowed by physical threats due to a reawakened grasp of their spiritual immortality.
Islam seems so Old Testament sometimes, that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it is essentially a 7th-century revival of the religion of Moses and Joshua, a throwback to pre-Christian (and pre-Talmudic) times. In fact, though, some of the central concepts of Islam are distinctively Christian rather than Mosaic. Here I want to look at some of the main Old and New Testament currents in the thought of the Quran. I refer to books of scripture rather than to religions because both Christianity and Islam have long histories and many sects, embracing a variety of ideas and emphases. I will also be looking only at central concepts, not surface-level details like circumcision and not eating pork. As a final caveat, I should note that I haven't actually read the Quran in nearly 15 years and will be going by memory here.
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Old Testament ideas in the Quran
1. Monoloatry. The exclusive worship of one God is the primary religious duty. Idolatry and the worship of other gods are the primary sins. This is absolutely central to both the Old Testament and the Quran but is not mentioned at all in any of the Gospels. It became an issue again when Paul took Christianity to the Greeks and Romans, but Paul clearly got it from the Old Testament, not from anything that Jesus taught.
2. Theocracy. God's law is to be enforced, and those who offend him are to be punished, typically with either exile or death. Living under Sharia would be very similar to living under the Mosaic theocracy. Jesus, though, even though as the Messiah he was expected to reestablish a theocracy, explicitly refused to do so. Later Christian history would feature such things as the Inquisition, of course, but this does not come from the New Testament.
3. Jihad. God's people are literally at war with those who serve other gods and should try to exterminate them and their religion. This is central to the Torah and the Deuteronomistic History, and of course to the Quran as well. The jihad concept is largely absent from the New Testament, except as an occasional metaphor, and Jesus sometimes taught the direct opposite: resist not evil, turn the other cheek, etc.
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New Testament ideas in the Quran
1. Belief. Of course everyone with a religious message hopes that that message will be believed, but the New Testament and Quran stand out for their extreme emphasis on the moral duty to believe in God and his messengers. The Gospel of John alone uses the word believe twice as many times as the entire Old Testament and says "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." The Quran constantly inveighs against "those who take God's messengers for liars." The Old Testament, for all its holy wars, contains not a single reference to "unbelievers" or "infidels"; rather, the enemy are the uncircumcised.
2. Heaven and hell. There is no real afterlife in the Old Testament -- only sheol, which seems sometimes to be something like the Homeric afterlife (an undifferentiated realm of half-conscious shades) and sometimes just a name for "the grave." God's rewards and punishments were expected to come in this life -- either one's own life or that of his descendants. Heaven and hell were introduced by Jesus and are a major theme of the Quran as well. (The Quranic paradise has often been characterized as crudely materialistic -- "gardens beneath which rivers flow" -- but I'm not sure that is fair. Christians have used similar metaphors to describe Heaven, and there is no obvious reason to assume Muhammad was being literal.)
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The central synthesis
The fundamental Islamic credo -- "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet" -- neatly encapsulates the synthesis of Old and New Testament ideas. For Moses, the central religious duty is to worship one God exclusively. For Jesus, it is to believe in God and his messengers. For Muhammad, these are combined into a duty to believe in one God exclusively -- to deny the existence of any other gods -- and to believe in his messenger.
Of course, modern Christianity attempts, like Islam, to embrace both the Old and the New Testaments, and this has often led to a very Islam-like stance: that one's duty is to believe and obey human religious authorities and deny the existence of all gods but one.
